12 ms·

My New Philosophy Website

41 points by xenophanes 17y ago

byrneseyeview 17y ago
This would be far more interesting if you kept the premises to yourself and got busy with the applications. Delete your essay about why capitalism is good, and replace it with an essay extolling the virtues of price gouging during natural disasters. (Price gouging during natural disasters is a good thing, because it encourages the accumulation of excess gougable goods. If a hurricane means you can rent your $500 chainsaw out for $10,000, it also means that it makes economic sense to own a chainsaw you'll rarely--or never--use. The disaster reallocates capital from the people who accumulated cash to the people who accumulated physical goods that help them survive disasters. The efficient market triumphs.)
- philwelch 17y ago
  "This would be far more interesting if you kept the premises to yourself and got busy with the applications." That's actually the exact opposite of philosophy.
- SapphireSun 17y ago
  Shameless self promotion: I started a blog to deal with some applications (it only has one essay so far (on consciousness) though): http://wsessays.blogspot.com/ http://wsessays.blogspot.com/
- barrkel 17y ago
  Of course, gouging may also attract social opprobrium or worse, get you killed.
  - eru 17y ago
    That's why you need to spread the wisdom about the benefits of gouging _before_ the disaster.
    - vl 17y ago
      That's why you need to stockpile 9mm Luger and 5.56 NATO ammo. In case of truly large-scale natural disaster ammo will quickly become standard (and possibly only) exchange equivalent. In other words ammo will replace money.
      - eru 17y ago
        Perhaps in the US or Switzerland or Canada. I guess we do not have enough handguns in most of Europe for this to become feasible. If I was a survivalist, I'd stockpile canned food and some can openers. By the way, do you have any data for your argument i.e. any incident after which ammo was the primary means of exchange? After the last war in Germany, cigarettes were pretty big. What do people in Haiti use? (Or is this not large-scale enough?) What did people use after the Tsunami in south-east Asia?
ashishbharthi 17y ago
Wasnt able to read full articles but my initial view on look and feel is font size for article text is two small.
- pavs 17y ago
  http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
ambiate 17y ago
The dialog page reminds me of Crito
- madair 17y ago
  It reminds me of a 1950s morality PSA
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- sumeetjain 17y ago
  It seems to attempt the same style, but it's less of a pleasure to read through because neither character sounds particularly interested in what he's saying, and much of it reads like a script instead of an actual conversation. The 'John' character is especially frustrating, because he must know that he's operating from an unfair definition of "happiness" (Do whatever you want whenever you want it). And the worst part is that instead of an enlightening payoff at the end, it's a 21st-century punchline. I'm not trying to be mean - I was just hoping for an interesting read. I would suggest having an actual conversation with someone about education, children, and happiness - and then posting that with some edits for readability. And if that's what you did for this piece, then I would suggest refining your own thoughts more clearly before the next conversation and then choosing another dialogue parter.
ntulip 17y ago
Quote: "The guy who disagrees with me isn't a thinking person with a genuine opinion. He is an ignorant idiot who has not seen the self-evident truth I know. Therefore, it's not a real disagreement, he's just being a stubborn jerk even though there's no possibility he's right." That attitude is most commonly applied to Republicans. Just kidding. It's most commonly applied to children." End Quote Awesome!
michaelkeenan 17y ago
I suggest adding a <title> tag. Currently my browser is just displaying the URL as the title in its tab.
- xenophanes 17y ago
  I've added titles. Also increased the font size a bit. Thanks.
  - _Lemon_ 17y ago
    Font size is huuuuge for me: http://i50.tinypic.com/cp06h.jpg http://i50.tinypic.com/cp06h.jpg Or at least, not the most readable. Pressing ctrl+- from that is much better. On a side note, I feel the front page lacks structure. What are the links? Do they follow on from each other? Or can I just read each "block". Why are they separated into blocks?
    - xenophanes 17y ago
      The text in your jpg picture doesn't look huge to me. I think people have widely varying taste in font size. I don't really know what I should set the default as. Anyone got general advice? About the structure, they are vaguely intended to be read in order, and they are grouped into related topics, but it's not especially important which is why I didn't emphasize it more.
      - bmelton 17y ago
        I think how it looked in his screenshot is quite good, actually. It also looks quite good in my browser, for what it's worth. I don't mean to argue for argument's sake, but I wouldn't change it.
      - jseliger 17y ago
        There seems to be a dichotomy between the font sizers favored by designers, particularly of Wordpress themes, and most readers: the former like smaller font sizes that look better when taken as part of the whole graphical packages, while the latter like larger fonts. I remember Joel Spolsky saying somewhere that he thought part of the reason Joel on Software succeeded in attracting visitors was/is because of its large font relative to many other software development websites. He was joking—but only in part. Incidentally, the small font size defaults caused me to buy the CSS upgrade at Wordpress for The Story's Story at http://jseliger.com http://jseliger.com . You tell me if it looks better than most other Wordpress blogs you've seen based the size of its font.
hnhg 17y ago
I'm not the biggest fan of these essays, to be frank, but if anyone's interested in philosophy as much as I am then they might enjoy these 2 sites: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/ http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/ http://www.philosophersnet.com/ http://www.philosophersnet.com/
morbidkk 17y ago
nice read. other interesting links to read http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?LifePatterns http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?LifePatterns and http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ReallyValuablePages http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ReallyValuablePages
AngryParsley 17y ago
You seem to respect tradition quite a bit compared to myself. I have a question: If we lived in ancient Rome, would you have a similar respect for their traditions? engages alternate reality machine Clearly our Roman traditions must be doing something right. After all, they have allowed us to build a rich and prosperous empire. It is good to follow these traditions of slavery, genocide, and chauvinism when we can, for they contain valuable knowledge. turns off alternate reality machine I know my example is contrived and somewhat silly, but somehow we got from ancient Rome to the modern world. This wasn't just due to change in technology or median income, it was from change in traditions and morality. I think it's incredibly egocentric to assume that we, today, have stumbled on the "best" set of traditions. Which brings me to my real question: Why did you pick those traditions? If you were from a different culture, you would have picked different traditions. If you have some underlying reason for picking those traditions, why not make that the tradition to follow?
- xenophanes 17y ago
  That's a good question. I would take the same attitude in Roman times. Their traditions had a lot of flaws, but they were (in most respects) the best knowledge available at the time. I don't think people could have improved from Roman times by ignoring or disrespecting what they already did know then. I think you've misunderstood a bit because I am not saying our current traditions are the best possible traditions. (That wouldn't even make much sense because they contradict each other frequently.) I am in favor of changing traditions in a gradualist, piecemeal fashion because I think that's the most effective way to make progress. You might compare it to updating big, messy legacy code systems. You want to do one thing at a time and then run the code or the tests to make sure you didn't break anything and the change works as intended. If you add a bunch of stuff at once, and then there's a problem, it's harder to figure out which change was behind it.
  - AngryParsley 17y ago
    Hmm, that's a consistent approach, but it reminds me of a hill-climbing algorithm. Don't you think we could do better? For example, it would probably be helpful to study how cultures and traditions changed in the past. At some point, some guy changed his mind from pro-slavery to anti-slavery without initially wanting to become anti-slavery. How did this happen? If we could identify the sort of thought process that leads to these novel conclusions, we could apply it to our own traditions and figure out beneficial changes.
jacoblyles 17y ago
I read over the "Capitalism" essay, and it was full of simplistic, thoroughly-used ideas with a strong Randian smell. What is interesting about this site? What does it add to the conversation that's new? How is this different from Yet Another Crank Amateur Internet Philosopher Blog (YACAIPB)?
MikeCapone 17y ago
Those interested in the art of human rationality should check out these two excellent sister sites: http://lesswrong.com http://lesswrong.com (click on the about page, and then start with the post sequences linked next to "about", not with the most recent posts) http://www.overcomingbias.com http://www.overcomingbias.com
- AngryParsley 17y ago
  Agreed. Most of my posts here are based on ideas I read on Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias. Anyone who hasn't visited these sites should probably take a look at the sequences: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Map_and_Territory_(sequence) http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Map_and_Territory_(sequence) http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Mysterious_Answers_to_Mysterious_Questions http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Mysterious_Answers_to_Mysteri... http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_Mind http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_M... The meta-ethics sequence is probably the closest thing to what I read on fallibleideas.com: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence If you're easily distracted on a computer and you want this sort of stuff in book form, I recommend Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics by Gary Drescher.
swombat 17y ago
However, relativism is incorrect because it says that all knowledge depends on the context. It's a bit like saying that all questions are ambiguous just because some are and because precision is difficult. Also, relativism is ambiguous about whether contextual knowledge is absolutely truth within that context; many relativists object to the idea of any absolute, permanent, unitary truth. But why should the truth for a given context ever change? Relativism provides an argument that the context is important, but no argument that the truth can change if we keep the context constant. If you look into eastern philosophies, you'll find an interesting concept: that there is in fact no objective truth that can be expressed. This is subtly different from a relativistic argument, though. The idea is, we can only express thoughts, ideas, etc, in terms of words and concepts that are products of our minds. And those products of our minds are intrinsically personal. Even with mundane things like tables or hoovers we might disagree on the meaning of words. Society teaches us to have more or less the same meanings so we can communicate, but those are intrinsically relative. So then, there may well be an underlying, intrinsically "absolutely true" reality (in fact, there almost certainly is), but any attempt to express it results in a statement of relative truth.
- xenophanes 17y ago
  > those products of our minds are intrinsically personal An idea in my mind is that 2+2=4. What's personal about that?
  - AngryParsley 17y ago
    >What would convince me that 2 + 2 = 3, in other words, is exactly the same kind of evidence that currently convinces me that 2 + 2 = 4: The evidential crossfire of physical observation, mental visualization, and social agreement. From http://lesswrong.com/lw/jr/how_to_convince_me_that_2_2_3/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/jr/how_to_convince_me_that_2_2_3/ I should note that Eliezer does not argue for moral relativism. Although there are no moral laws written into the fabric of the universe, humans all have very similar brains. With the exception of some outliers (sociopaths) most of our moral intuitions are very similar. There's also the caveat that culture, religion, and philosophy (among other things) can work as an "off switch" for these intuitions.
emilind 17y ago
If the problem you're addressing is a lack of right-wing sites made by insane cranks, mission accomplished.
known 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
- xenophanes 17y ago
  Could you explain the point you're getting at?
  - known 17y ago
    I found it comprehensive.

41 points by xenophanes 17y ago

This would be far more interesting if you kept the premises to yourself and got busy with the applications. Delete your essay about why capitalism is good, and replace it with an essay extolling the virtues of price gouging during natural disasters. (Price gouging during natural disasters is a good thing, because it encourages the accumulation of excess gougable goods. If a hurricane means you can rent your $500 chainsaw out for $10,000, it also means that it makes economic sense to own a chainsaw you'll rarely--or never--use. The disaster reallocates capital from the people who accumulated cash to the people who accumulated physical goods that help them survive disasters. The efficient market triumphs.)

philwelch 17y ago
"This would be far more interesting if you kept the premises to yourself and got busy with the applications." That's actually the exact opposite of philosophy.
SapphireSun 17y ago
Shameless self promotion: I started a blog to deal with some applications (it only has one essay so far (on consciousness) though): http://wsessays.blogspot.com/ http://wsessays.blogspot.com/
barrkel 17y ago
Of course, gouging may also attract social opprobrium or worse, get you killed.
- eru 17y ago
  That's why you need to spread the wisdom about the benefits of gouging _before_ the disaster.
  - vl 17y ago
    That's why you need to stockpile 9mm Luger and 5.56 NATO ammo. In case of truly large-scale natural disaster ammo will quickly become standard (and possibly only) exchange equivalent. In other words ammo will replace money.
    - eru 17y ago
      Perhaps in the US or Switzerland or Canada. I guess we do not have enough handguns in most of Europe for this to become feasible. If I was a survivalist, I'd stockpile canned food and some can openers. By the way, do you have any data for your argument i.e. any incident after which ammo was the primary means of exchange? After the last war in Germany, cigarettes were pretty big. What do people in Haiti use? (Or is this not large-scale enough?) What did people use after the Tsunami in south-east Asia?

ashishbharthi 17y ago

Wasnt able to read full articles but my initial view on look and feel is font size for article text is two small.

pavs 17y ago
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

ambiate 17y ago

The dialog page reminds me of Crito

madair 17y ago
It reminds me of a 1950s morality PSA
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
sumeetjain 17y ago
It seems to attempt the same style, but it's less of a pleasure to read through because neither character sounds particularly interested in what he's saying, and much of it reads like a script instead of an actual conversation. The 'John' character is especially frustrating, because he must know that he's operating from an unfair definition of "happiness" (Do whatever you want whenever you want it). And the worst part is that instead of an enlightening payoff at the end, it's a 21st-century punchline. I'm not trying to be mean - I was just hoping for an interesting read. I would suggest having an actual conversation with someone about education, children, and happiness - and then posting that with some edits for readability. And if that's what you did for this piece, then I would suggest refining your own thoughts more clearly before the next conversation and then choosing another dialogue parter.

ntulip 17y ago

Quote: "The guy who disagrees with me isn't a thinking person with a genuine opinion. He is an ignorant idiot who has not seen the self-evident truth I know. Therefore, it's not a real disagreement, he's just being a stubborn jerk even though there's no possibility he's right." That attitude is most commonly applied to Republicans. Just kidding. It's most commonly applied to children." End Quote Awesome!

michaelkeenan 17y ago

I suggest adding a <title> tag. Currently my browser is just displaying the URL as the title in its tab.

xenophanes 17y ago
I've added titles. Also increased the font size a bit. Thanks.
- _Lemon_ 17y ago
  Font size is huuuuge for me: http://i50.tinypic.com/cp06h.jpg http://i50.tinypic.com/cp06h.jpg Or at least, not the most readable. Pressing ctrl+- from that is much better. On a side note, I feel the front page lacks structure. What are the links? Do they follow on from each other? Or can I just read each "block". Why are they separated into blocks?
  - xenophanes 17y ago
    The text in your jpg picture doesn't look huge to me. I think people have widely varying taste in font size. I don't really know what I should set the default as. Anyone got general advice? About the structure, they are vaguely intended to be read in order, and they are grouped into related topics, but it's not especially important which is why I didn't emphasize it more.
    - bmelton 17y ago
      I think how it looked in his screenshot is quite good, actually. It also looks quite good in my browser, for what it's worth. I don't mean to argue for argument's sake, but I wouldn't change it.
    - jseliger 17y ago
      There seems to be a dichotomy between the font sizers favored by designers, particularly of Wordpress themes, and most readers: the former like smaller font sizes that look better when taken as part of the whole graphical packages, while the latter like larger fonts. I remember Joel Spolsky saying somewhere that he thought part of the reason Joel on Software succeeded in attracting visitors was/is because of its large font relative to many other software development websites. He was joking—but only in part. Incidentally, the small font size defaults caused me to buy the CSS upgrade at Wordpress for The Story's Story at http://jseliger.com http://jseliger.com . You tell me if it looks better than most other Wordpress blogs you've seen based the size of its font.

hnhg 17y ago

I'm not the biggest fan of these essays, to be frank, but if anyone's interested in philosophy as much as I am then they might enjoy these 2 sites: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/ http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/ http://www.philosophersnet.com/ http://www.philosophersnet.com/

morbidkk 17y ago

nice read. other interesting links to read http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?LifePatterns http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?LifePatterns and http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ReallyValuablePages http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ReallyValuablePages

AngryParsley 17y ago

You seem to respect tradition quite a bit compared to myself. I have a question: If we lived in ancient Rome, would you have a similar respect for their traditions? engages alternate reality machine Clearly our Roman traditions must be doing something right. After all, they have allowed us to build a rich and prosperous empire. It is good to follow these traditions of slavery, genocide, and chauvinism when we can, for they contain valuable knowledge. turns off alternate reality machine I know my example is contrived and somewhat silly, but somehow we got from ancient Rome to the modern world. This wasn't just due to change in technology or median income, it was from change in traditions and morality. I think it's incredibly egocentric to assume that we, today, have stumbled on the "best" set of traditions. Which brings me to my real question: Why did you pick those traditions? If you were from a different culture, you would have picked different traditions. If you have some underlying reason for picking those traditions, why not make that the tradition to follow?

xenophanes 17y ago
That's a good question. I would take the same attitude in Roman times. Their traditions had a lot of flaws, but they were (in most respects) the best knowledge available at the time. I don't think people could have improved from Roman times by ignoring or disrespecting what they already did know then. I think you've misunderstood a bit because I am not saying our current traditions are the best possible traditions. (That wouldn't even make much sense because they contradict each other frequently.) I am in favor of changing traditions in a gradualist, piecemeal fashion because I think that's the most effective way to make progress. You might compare it to updating big, messy legacy code systems. You want to do one thing at a time and then run the code or the tests to make sure you didn't break anything and the change works as intended. If you add a bunch of stuff at once, and then there's a problem, it's harder to figure out which change was behind it.
- AngryParsley 17y ago
  Hmm, that's a consistent approach, but it reminds me of a hill-climbing algorithm. Don't you think we could do better? For example, it would probably be helpful to study how cultures and traditions changed in the past. At some point, some guy changed his mind from pro-slavery to anti-slavery without initially wanting to become anti-slavery. How did this happen? If we could identify the sort of thought process that leads to these novel conclusions, we could apply it to our own traditions and figure out beneficial changes.

jacoblyles 17y ago

I read over the "Capitalism" essay, and it was full of simplistic, thoroughly-used ideas with a strong Randian smell. What is interesting about this site? What does it add to the conversation that's new? How is this different from Yet Another Crank Amateur Internet Philosopher Blog (YACAIPB)?

MikeCapone 17y ago

Those interested in the art of human rationality should check out these two excellent sister sites: http://lesswrong.com http://lesswrong.com (click on the about page, and then start with the post sequences linked next to "about", not with the most recent posts) http://www.overcomingbias.com http://www.overcomingbias.com

AngryParsley 17y ago
Agreed. Most of my posts here are based on ideas I read on Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias. Anyone who hasn't visited these sites should probably take a look at the sequences: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Map_and_Territory_(sequence) http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Map_and_Territory_(sequence) http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Mysterious_Answers_to_Mysterious_Questions http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Mysterious_Answers_to_Mysteri... http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_Mind http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_M... The meta-ethics sequence is probably the closest thing to what I read on fallibleideas.com: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence If you're easily distracted on a computer and you want this sort of stuff in book form, I recommend Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics by Gary Drescher.

swombat 17y ago

However, relativism is incorrect because it says that all knowledge depends on the context. It's a bit like saying that all questions are ambiguous just because some are and because precision is difficult. Also, relativism is ambiguous about whether contextual knowledge is absolutely truth within that context; many relativists object to the idea of any absolute, permanent, unitary truth. But why should the truth for a given context ever change? Relativism provides an argument that the context is important, but no argument that the truth can change if we keep the context constant. If you look into eastern philosophies, you'll find an interesting concept: that there is in fact no objective truth that can be expressed. This is subtly different from a relativistic argument, though. The idea is, we can only express thoughts, ideas, etc, in terms of words and concepts that are products of our minds. And those products of our minds are intrinsically personal. Even with mundane things like tables or hoovers we might disagree on the meaning of words. Society teaches us to have more or less the same meanings so we can communicate, but those are intrinsically relative. So then, there may well be an underlying, intrinsically "absolutely true" reality (in fact, there almost certainly is), but any attempt to express it results in a statement of relative truth.

xenophanes 17y ago
> those products of our minds are intrinsically personal An idea in my mind is that 2+2=4. What's personal about that?
- AngryParsley 17y ago
  >What would convince me that 2 + 2 = 3, in other words, is exactly the same kind of evidence that currently convinces me that 2 + 2 = 4: The evidential crossfire of physical observation, mental visualization, and social agreement. From http://lesswrong.com/lw/jr/how_to_convince_me_that_2_2_3/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/jr/how_to_convince_me_that_2_2_3/ I should note that Eliezer does not argue for moral relativism. Although there are no moral laws written into the fabric of the universe, humans all have very similar brains. With the exception of some outliers (sociopaths) most of our moral intuitions are very similar. There's also the caveat that culture, religion, and philosophy (among other things) can work as an "off switch" for these intuitions.

emilind 17y ago

If the problem you're addressing is a lack of right-wing sites made by insane cranks, mission accomplished.

known 17y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

xenophanes 17y ago
Could you explain the point you're getting at?
- known 17y ago
  I found it comprehensive.